Blockchain relies on the underlying peer-to-peer (P2P) networking to broadcast and get up-to-date on the blocks and transactions. Because of the blockchain operations’ reliance on the information provided by P2P networking, it is imperative to have high P2P connectivity for the quality of the blockchain system operations and performances. High P2P networking connectivity ensures that a peer node is connected to multiple other peers providing a diverse set of observers of the current state of the blockchain and transactions. However, in a permissionless Bitcoin cryptocurrency network, using the peer identifiers – including the current approach of counting the number of distinct IP addresses and port numbers – can be ineffective in measuring the number of peer connections and estimating the networking connectivity. Such current approach is further challenged by the networking threats manipulating identities. We build a robust estimation engine for the P2P networking connectivity by sensing and processing the P2P networking traffic. We take a systematic approach to study our engine and analyze the followings: the different components of the connectivity estimation engine and how they affect the accuracy performances, the role and the effectiveness of an outlier detection to enhance the connectivity estimation, and the engine’s interplay with the Bitcoin protocol. We implement a working Bitcoin prototype connected to the Bitcoin mainnet to validate and improve our engine’s performances and evaluate the estimation accuracy and cost efficiency of our connectivity estimation engine. Our results show that our scheme effectively counters the identity-manipulations threats, achieves 96.4% estimation accuracy with a tolerance of one peer connection, and is lightweight in the overheads in the mining rate, thus making it appropriate for the miner deployment.
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This content will become publicly available on May 27, 2025
From Slow Propagation to Partition: Analyzing Bitcoin Over Anonymous Routing
Cryptocurrency is designed for anonymous financial
transactions to avoid centralized control, censorship, and regulations.
To protect anonymity in the underlying P2P networking,
Bitcoin adopts and supports anonymous routing of Tor, I2P,
and CJDNS. We analyze the networking performances of these
anonymous routing with the focus on their impacts on the
blockchain consensus protocol. Compared to non-anonymous
routing, anonymous routing adds inherent-by-design latency
performance costs due to the additions of the artificial P2P
relays. However, we discover that the lack of ecosystem plays
an even bigger factor in the performances of the anonymous
routing for cryptocurrency blockchain. I2P and CJDNS, both
advancing the anonymous routing beyond Tor, in particular
lack the ecosystem of sizable networking-peer participation. I2P
and CJDNS thus result in the Bitcoin experiencing networking
partitioning, which has traditionally been researched and studied
in cryptocurrency/blockchain security. We focus on I2P and Tor
and compare them with the non-anonymous routing because
CJDNS has no active public peers resulting in no connectivity. Tor
results in slow propagation while I2P yields soft partition, which
is a partition effect long enough to have a substantial impact
in the PoW mining. To better study and identify the latency
and the ecosystem factors of the cryptocurrency networking and
consensus costs, we study the behaviors both in the connection
manager (directly involved in the P2P networking) and the
address manager (informing the connection manager of the peer
selections on the backend). This paper presents our analyses
results to inform the state of cryptocurrency blockchain with
anonymous routing and discusses future work directions and
recommendations to resolve the performance and partition issues.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1922410
- PAR ID:
- 10509863
- Publisher / Repository:
- IEEE
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency ICBC
- ISSN:
- 2832-8892
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Dublin, Ireland
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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